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Please join us the launch of
On Architecture: Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology
Wednesday, November 20th
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Société des Arts Technologiques
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The following excerpt is from On Architecture: Melvin Charney, A Critical Anthology, edited by Louis Martin.
Gardens … should not be wanting of columns and obelisks.
Leon Battista Alberti in De Re Aedificatori
The placement of columns in the CCA garden was derived, as were other devices, from a reading of historical types. In the same way as the cadastral walls “reveal” an ancient structure of land division, so the placement of herms, statues that served to mark farms and boundaries in Greek and Roman times, is recovered by the position of allegorical columns on the esplanade and in relation to the cadastral grid of the garden. These columns also reveal the situation of allegorical, columnar figures, which lined garden walks, allées, avenues, and esplanades in later centuries.
An allegory is a narrative, a commentary of one text read through another, an extended metaphor. The narrative presented by the columns is intended to capture and objectify an architectural discourse derived from distinctive buildings, as befits a museum of architecture. As elsewhere in the garden, the columns were made to establish self-reflexive dualities. A first line of columns was set up as the direct counterpoint to and reflection of actual parts of the city, while a second line was set up as a counterpoint to and reflection of the first series of columns, echoing the first as the first echoes the architecture of the city.
The buildings which can be readily identified from the esplanade and which constitute a slice of significant architecture can be discerned in what remains of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial quartiers of the lower town, below the escarpment. The essential elements of an industrial city are evident, even though most of the factories have been abandoned and large parts of these neighbourhoods were demolished during the wave of urban “renewal” that swept across Montreal in the 1960s and 1970s. The area directly south of the site, known as la petite Bourgogne, was particularly affected. Nevertheless, the surviving buildings reveal the transposition of a proto-classic vernacular brought over to North America by settlers into an indigenous, proto-modern typology that re-emerged later in the heroic period of the modern movement in Europe. It still reverberates in our grasp of built form.
The narrative begins at the column bases, which pick up on the tenement blocks typical of the industrial quartiers – the houses of people whose lives were crushed by the factory and the church. Commentary on the form of the house as a type and as an archetype is woven through the sequence of columns, a subtext to the overall narrative. These “houses” are built of wood and encased in copper in the manner of local religious statuary, and inserted into columns of concrete and steel. The narrative sequence of the columns is arranged in rows from east to west, starting with the column closest to the edge of the esplanade.
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